Seven Red

It ain’t easy bein’ greazy, in this world full of cleanliness and, you know, all that other madness. – Method Man

Today I was going to discuss some good tags I’ve seen here in Chicago, but I forgot the damn camera at home, so we’ll have to save that discussion for next week. Specifically, I was going to talk about NEGROE and VEGAN, both of whom are interesting in their own right. VEGAN, incidentally, seems to be the marker tag king of the north side. His stuff is not only stylistically sophisticated, but also everywhere. So, rather than waste the week, I’ll take this opportunity to talk about ups. As I said in the first installment, I’ll be talking primarily about styles and ups. This breaks the discussion down into something like an aesthetic category and an economic category, where the first can be described in terms of typography and other factors, while the second can be described in terms of proliferation. So for this installment, I want to talk about proliferation: getting up.

Understanding graffiti means understanding a complex prestige economy, with graffiti writers competing for the esteem of other writers, even if that respect is given grudgingly (i.e., “That’s kids a dick, but he’s up.”). Being up means that you bomb a lot, that your shit is everywhere, that you’re “all city.” The object of the game, to put it another way, is fame, respect, prestige. Ghetto Superstar. You walk in the room and people are like, damn, there go X. OK, that’s a bit much, but you get the idea. The problem is in identifying what gets you there. What are the evaluative criteria for ups?

Before we get to that, I want to return to something I mentioned earlier: the necessary illegality of graffiti. If graffiti wasn’t illegal, it wouldn’t have the same cachet in youth communities, and not only because it would no longer be a case of sticking it to the Man, or anything like that. If the chief end of graffiti is prestige, the chief engine is risk, and illegality constitutes the risk. Put plainly, the graffiti economy works very much like the bond market: the more risk, the more return on investment.

The principle of risk, in fact, dictates almost every aspect of graffiti ethics. Just as an example, take ragging. Ragging involves “going over” or otherwise defacing someone else’s work, and it is a severe breach (yes, the subculture is not without irony). Popular culture has assimilated the idea that “crossing somebody out” is a graffiti no-no, but the story is, in fact, much more complex. You can put a paint tag over a marker tag, for instance, without causing beef. Or, you can put a throwie over a paint tag, a fill-in over an outline, a straight-letter over a fill-in, or a burner over a straight letter. But you can’t do any of these in reverse or at the same level. A fill-in over a fill-in is instant beef: ragging. A paint tag over a straight letter? Be prepared to throw hands, son. Or, as we used to put it: settle your business on the walls and on the street (i.e., your own work will now be targeted, and if you meet up, it’s going to be a fight). But what organizes this hierarchy? Risk. The entire hierarchy of acceptable covering is organized by the time (and therefore exposure to arrest) it takes to finish the work. It only takes 5 seconds to cop a tag; it can take up to 2 minutes to complete a moderately sized throwie. Very obviously, the person exposing himself to danger for 2 minutes deserves more respect than the person exposing himself to danger for 5 seconds. It can take several hours to do a burner, so that’s the top of the exposure hierarchy, aesthetics aside. That’s how the whole thing works, when we leave out the aesthetics of it. (Like all economic models, this one is highly artificial: the aesthetics can never really be separated). You should start to see why the legal wall doesn’t get you nearly as much respect as the illegal wall: there is no risk at the legal wall at all. Indeed, one of the problems of legal graffiti is that it undermines this very principle of risk, fixating, instead, on the object. Graffiti – the illegal kind – is a lived process, a lived adventure. It is the difference between a dead work of art on a wall and life itself as a work of art.

I’ve talked about risk primarily as the risk of arrest. I’d say this is the primary force that runs the engine. But there are also other risks. Obviously, time of exposure varies according to location: a straight letter in an abandoned factory district is not as risky as a fill-in at a major intersection. Location plays another role related to risk as well: you get respect by hitting particularly dangerous locations (water towers, trestle overpasses, and generally any place that you can fall off of and die.). I once saw a video in which GIZ jumped on to the tracks to hit a train that had just pulled into the station. That was fucking nuts: out the train went, running graff in this day and age!

So, why are ups important? The more ups you have, 1) the more you are likely to be seen (that’s the obvious point – the dead art object), but also, 2) the more risk you have taken on (life as a work of art). This is the underbelly of the prestige economy, and why the liberals are wrong when they try to restrict graffiti to “art,” or even “protest.” Graffiti is – in part, of course – about exposing the self to risk. The signature is merely an index or after-effect of that exposure. Every graffiti writer has this story: “So I was out bombing with so-and-so, and we were filling in on that fat spot over on X street. Bloop bloop. It’s the sound of the beast. We jet, and they gave chase. Hopped some fences, ended up down on the tracks, fat fucker didn’t want to jump the fences. Badow! Guess who ain’t goin’ to Central tonight? And you know I went back and finished that fill-in, son. Only to find so-and-so already at it!” Translation: they were in the middle of bombing, the cops came, they ran, they escaped, and then they went back to finish. Just as the half-completed work of graffiti tells you somebody got chased or caught, the finished work tells you they survived. And it’s that margin of survival that’s important.

(The one exception I heard about: A buddy and I bumped into a writer named FEW. I think he hung out with DASH and SPONE. Ridgewood kid, if I remember. He told us that he was once hitting a rooftop over in Long Island City – only one way up and down. In the middle of their fill-ins a couple of plainclothes pulled up below and shouted at them to come on down. They knew they were going to be arrested anyway, so they finished their outlines before coming down. Of course, that could be a bullshit story. It’s just the kind of bullshit story a writer would tell.)

So, with an understanding of the risk engine, I want to show you the primary ways writers go about getting ups: repetition and the singular work.

Repetition

Repetition means just that: you are a prolific writer. You expose yourself to risk constantly, in many settings and under many conditions. Note the following collection of COPE throwie’s found at Insane Fame:

(Click image for large view)

Each of those constitute a substantial risk, and I only took a small selection of the small selection of COPE’s larger body of work. When you have ups like that, you’re just badass. Again, check out the small selection of work by CRO and CHINO, also from Insane Fame:

(Click image for large view)

Two points here: You should notice that the same style or shape repeats across instances. This is the sense in which graffiti is truly a signature. Everyone can recognize CRO’s distinctive throwies, CHINO’s well-known tags, or COPE’s famous throwie-straight. The repetition is important. But you also must vary, as is better seen in CRO’s various styles than in COPE’s uniform work. Second, you can see the the differences in settings. It’s not enough to just bomb your own neighborhood and the surroundings. You have to venture out to all spots and all boroughs. Obviously, doing so increases your exposure in terms of visibility, but it also increases your risk quotient, since you are in an unfamiliar area, and you might face not just cops, but the various locals there, who may be, er, unfriendly…Life as a work of art isn’t always pretty.

Singularity

The other key to getting ups – getting noticed – is the unusual or original piece, location, act, etc. If COPE gets fame through proliferation, others can achieve a margin of fame by doing something unique. It’s the kind of thing people see and say, “that’s fucking nuts” (in which case it is a wow moment for the audience), or, “that’s a good idea.” It is the graffiti version of having an Idea, or changing up the game. I want to provide a few examples to give you a sense of it. Once again, these images can be found along with many others at Insane Fame. Please visit them and check it out.

a) The Multiple (Image from Streets are Saying Things) – In the flick below, we have a very simple version of multiple fill-ins in one location, in this case by DUEL and JA, both of whom are proliferation writers as well. They jumped down off the platform to do this, so it’s even more risky. It’s risky enough to do ONE duster off the platform (a duster is a light coat for the fill-in, when you’re short on time). But the genius, the ultimate Fuck You, consists in doing something so risky and staying down there so goddamn long. Not for nothing, but I also wonder about the mechanics of this. Assuming that they were both filling in at the same time, I would think that they’d get in each other’s way?

(Click image for larger view)

b) Nice Thought! – In the following case, DARKS comes up with a nice idea, hitting a letter on each platform of an external stairwell. The value here is in the unusual arrangement and size. You can see this fucker from far away. Good Idea! Of course, this isn’t the first time such a thing was done, but it’s certainly a strong execution of the concept:

(Click image for larger view)

c) Just Plain Fucking Crazy – The JPFC category is quite large. You’d expect it to be given our discussion of risk above. It contains everything from people hanging off highway overpasses to huge tags on the front of police stations. Indeed, the threshold for nuts is somewhat skewed in graffiti cultures (given that anyone’s doing any of this in the first place). The best time for highway graffiti used to be around 9 o’clock, when the visibility was a bit off, but there were enough cars so that they couldn’t screech to a stop. So, essentially, you could be just off the shoulder with cars whizzing by at 70 mph about four feet behind you. And you largely have to ignore them. That’s standard fare. So, getting to Just Plain Fucking Crazy takes a bit of talent. For my money, one of the funniest cases of JPFC is the following image. Take a look:

(Click on image for larger view – MUST SEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!)

What you’re looking at here is a series of lower case e’s stretching around a large, brand new supermarket in the Bronx, the work of a writer called CHEEZ. In fact, you’re looking at a very partial view of what he did: the CHEEEEEEEZ stretches all the way around the entire supermarket, 300 feet in total. As a stylistic matter, the work is derivative, but as a matter of sheer balls, it’s close to the top of the charts. CHEEZ was apparently caught after the fact for this action (snitches everywhere), but damn is that fucking nuts. But to return to our risk category: imagine how long it must have taken to do this. I’m just glad he didn’t have it in his mind to do a fill-in!

So, that’s the round-up for today. Now you should be clear on styles and ups 101. The important thing to remember is that the two are fundamentally inextricable for graffiti culture. For this reason, graffiti as “art” gets it wrong. I’ve inveighed against “muralism,” but I really have nothing against the mural. I even like it. I like a well done legal wall, even. But the legal wall does something very insidious, as a theoretical matter. It separates styles from ups. Put another way, the legal wall takes the living process out of graffiti, focusing attention on the “end product.” It views the end product as comparable to something like gallery art, an object to be contemplated (and commodified, or “monetized,” as the wankers put it). Of course, artists throughout the 20th century have been working against this conception of art. They’ve been trying to insert process into the work of art rather than merely displaying it as an alienated product (a consumption good). One of the interesting features of graffiti is that process is included in the work as a matter of course. Because of the prohibition and graffiti’s unstable relation to property, the process is almost primary. Graffiti writers don’t have to invent aesthetic methods of including process into the work, like avant garde artists have done since the emergence of modernism (hell, a good deal of Renaissance painting does the same). Writing graffiti is that process itself – a very specific process that organizes an underground prestige economy around principles of risk. With that develops an entire ethic of risk, and an art of the self, or life as a work of art. Since I was myself fixated on a kind of formalism last week, I wanted to really emphasize this point this week (and thanks to Booga Face for the reminder on that).

When I say that social redemption ruined graffiti, I mean precisely this. Graffiti is redeemed socially in one of two ways: it is either restricted to the alienated end-product (as art), or it is transformed into an alienated protest of an underclass (resentiment, in Nietzsche’s terminology). The dichotomy with protest is brought out nicely in the film Bomb the System. The protagonist, a writer, falls in love with an anarchist lefty who does protest stencils on sidewalks. She encourages him to turn his talent to something productive, like what she does. Something meaningful. She is completely mystified by the ostensibly apolitical character of his writing: it is never oppositional enough with respect to content. (The film makes too much of graffiti as “protest” overall, but the particular dichotomy between the writers and the anarchist girl is well-constructed.) Both operations transform graffiti into something acceptable and familiar. The first legitimizes graffiti by placing it in the category of art. The second legitimizes graffiti by placing it into the category of protest. In both cases, something is amputated from the living practice of graffiti: its necessary illegitimacy. What can never be redeemed socially, what can never be folded into an acceptable set of practices, is graffiti as the living process of a risk economy – precisely because that risk is constituted in graffiti’s “anti-societal” elements, and precisely because those elements are essential (in the classical sense) to the operation of graffiti. All attempts to “legitimize” graffiti crash against this barrier: graffiti as a living practice is illegitimate by definition.

In any case, I think we’ve covered enough theoretical foundations. Next week, I promise to show you some Chicago graffiti.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS |